


a later addition

by batyatoon



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Academia, Ancient History, Gen, Inspired By Tumblr, Oral History, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Pseudo-History, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 02:16:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7489446
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batyatoon/pseuds/batyatoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heroes become legend; legend becomes Ancient Lit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a later addition

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://animatedamerican.tumblr.com/post/121356513927/kaasknot-trillgutterbug-takiki16), as a response to a lengthy discussion of what probably happens after the events of _Mad Max: Fury Road_. The original discussion is amazing; please go read it.

Fifteen centuries later, folklorists and historians debate whether there’s any historic truth to the legends: Immortan Furiosa and the Mothers of the Citadel, Aunty Entity of the Bartertowns, Savannah Nix of Morrowland, all these ancient women rulers and warriors.

It hardly seems likely, some say, that women could have risen to such preeminence in those savage times; these stories are most probably pure fantasy, a position supported by the presence of the chaotic Max figure in most of the tales. Wish fulfillment, they say, hopes built up out of utter hopelessness.

There’s almost certainly a seed of truth in them, say others. The likeliest explanation is that there was one ruling chieftess somewhere, an exceptional warrior and leader, and the scattered stories about her took on different names and wildly different variants to fit into the beliefs of the tellers. The ancient Morrowlander tribe, for instance, clearly borrowed someone else’s story of a brave woman leader and grafted it onto their legend of the Walker, possibly giving her the name of one of their own ancestresses.

Some historians, though, maintain that most if not all of these women almost certainly did exist, and that the oldest stories about them are very likely to contain at least some of what actually happened. Of course they probably weren’t contemporaries – the end of Entity’s reign would have come almost half a century before the beginning of Nix’s, and Furiosa’s even earlier – but the earliest forms of the legends are just too widely spread to have all originated with the same person.

Almost everybody agrees that the purely mythical Max figure, the suffering but undying trickster-savior who vanishes back into the desert as soon as everything is put right, is a later addition.


End file.
